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MPs: Octopuses feel pain and need legal protection
- stavros 5y agoSeeing live lobsters semi-frozen on ice so they can stay alive until you can take them home and then boil them alive is one of the cruelest forms of torture I've seen. Same with keeping chickens and pigs in cages the size of their bodies. This is all disgraceful, and if we can't at least respect the animals we eat, we probably don't deserve to eat them.
- extropy 5y agoHow about lettuce, carrots, eggs, etc? Just because their reaction times are slower does not mean they are not suffering? The truth is humans are wired to gauge the level of environmental danger by looking for personably relatable aggression events. And there is a practical limit how low we should go. Also with living more dense, humans are gotten way better at handling various aggressive stimuli, like noise, air pollution, constant close interaction. We have stopped treating them as aggression, but it still is for the rest of life on this rock.
- mdiesel 5y agoThe difference in intelligence between an egg and a chicken aren't just reaction times. Basic cellular life might respond to stimuli in a way we can call "pain", but they'll never understand it the same way. The difference is like us touching a hot stove and pulling away as an automatic response, versus the various forms of torture we've invented. That doesn't mean it's right, just that there is a difference and we'll all draw a line somewhere. A bit like how people see eating cats and dogs as somehow different from chickens and cows.
- ekianjo 5y agoYou are going to have a very hard time to re-conciliate eating food without causing pain (and yes, trees/plants probably also feel some kind of pain, while not the same as in the animal realm). Animals in the wild don't give a s** about the pain they cause to other species when they eat themselves alive, and eating a prey alive is the normal standard in nature. This being said, I'm all for minimizing suffering of anything involved in the food chain as much as possible. I consider that avoiding wasting food is just as important as reducing the pain we cause to animals.
- syops 5y agoThe person you responded to didn’t say anything about eating food without causing pain. Your first two paragraphs aren’t an appropriate response.
- justinclift 5y ago> Your first two paragraphs aren’t an appropriate response. Er... why not? They seem fairly reasonable to me.
- syops 5y agoIt would have been a reasonable response had OP mentioned anything about eating food without causing pain. As it is the response makes no sense because it addresses a point not raised by OP.
- justinclift 5y agoIsn't this bit about causing pain in food? > ... boil them alive is one of the cruelest forms of torture I've seen.
- syops 5y agoYou've changed things a bit now. The phrase in question is: eating food without causing pain The OP doesn't say this is what should be done. OP says that we should respect our food and talks about the living conditions of animals we eat and how they are killed. OP doesn't say or imply that we should eat food without causing pain.
- bjornjajayaja 5y agoThere’s a huge difference: in the animal kingdom all species play their part and live freely—yes there is predators and prey, and the wilderness can be a violent place. But humans breed animals in cesspools, and humans rip mother cows from its children to mass produce milk and beef—much of which is tossed in the dump in the name of “food safety.” Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary. Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil. I could go on and on. But you know, we’re all fucked from this behavior. In the name of money we will all perish at the hands of our fellow cheek-turners.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- xwolfi 5y agoThis is a feeling you have in time of fat cows, where food is everywhere and you probably should eat a bit less even. In times or places where this abundance is not as shockingly unnatural, the feeling of the food we consume takes less importance. And, as others said, it's not just animal. Killing a plant, often in way more atrocious manners, is just as bad. We'll probably have to murder and massacre our food for a bit longer. Live with it and work on synthetic food, this will resolve the problem you have with life-sourced food. Well except we'll probably still have to kill millions of animal and plants for population control. Heh. You know we also kill, without asking their opinion or respecting them much, other more exotic life-forms, like virii or bacterias, that are as innocent as the rabbit you had in your last civet. All they did was follow their instincts, and they didn't have a choice contaminating you; but you had a choice killing them.
- sinsterizme 5y agoI find it a bit strange that you seem to be assigning moral equivalence to animals, plants, viruses and bacteria. Animals should be of top priority because they are the most likely to feel the highest amount of pain by our actions, and we can feasibly take measures to prevent it
- justinclift 5y ago> they are the most likely to feel the highest amount of pain Is that just guesswork?
- sinsterizme 5y agoThere’s plenty of empirical studies done on animals where we observe they respond to painful stimuli similarly to humans and avoid similar situations thereafter. We can’t ask them so this is the best we have.
- justinclift 5y agoYes... and what about the others?
- helloplanets 5y agoThis reminds me that everyone should read Consider The Lobster by DFW. [1] It's such a straightforward, yet well written think piece about this exact subject. [1]: http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf
- wastholm 5y agoI got a 404 at that address but this seems to be the same article (I had to override a TLS certificate warning to get it): https://www.theessayexperiencefall2013.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2013/11/Consider-the-Lobster_david-foster-wallace.pdf https://www.theessayexperiencefall2013.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/...
- sharkweek 5y agoAlso available here as an audio recording, read by Wallace himself - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZOl7C_vDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZOl7C_vDI
- f6v 5y agoOut of interest, how do we decide if something is a torture? Imagine a machine that’s broken, does it feel pain? Say, you drop your iPhone with Siri on the floor. Is it cruel? Isn’t a lobster the same kind of machine, just a biological one?
- StavrosK 5y agoIndeed, how do we decide anything that's on a gradient?
- f6v 5y agoEthics aren’t universal.
- StavrosK 5y agoAre you arguing against deciding?
- f6v 5y agoI'm arguing that the decision might not be the same for everyone. > This is all disgraceful, and if we can't at least respect the animals we eat, we probably don't deserve to eat them. This will sound completely bananas to someone who doesn't live by the same principles as you do.
- StavrosK 5y agoI agree.
- uh_uh 5y agoWe can't decide because we don't have a machine that objectively measures consciousness. But it's safer to err on the side of mercy than to accidentally create hell on Earth.
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- pfortuny 5y agoDo you honestly think lions “respect” their food, and fungi, and viruses, and mantises?
- stavros 5y agoDo you honestly hold yourself to the same ethical standards as lions?
- recov 5y agoI think humans are a bit more civilized than lions, and can comprehend what we're doing.
- uh_uh 5y agoWhy do people think that the cruel behaviour of other creatures should give humans any pass in their own cruel behaviour? People don't seem to apply this logic when it comes to rape and murder (both very common in the animal kingdom) but when it comes to torturing other animals, suddenly it's all good for some reason.
- EvilEy3 5y agoBecause food doesn't fit in the same good/bad area. You can live without tape and murder, you can't live without food. And no, I don't want to eat fake plant based surrogate.
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- darkerside 5y agoFreezing then boiling live lobsters seems much less inhumane than factory farming mammals.
- AlexandrB 5y agoI agree. Even assuming that lobster suffer when they are boiled - that's an event that lasts but a minute or two. Many factory farmed animals spend their entire lives in various states of stress and suffering.
- AlexandrB 5y agoI think it's important to approach this topic with some nuance. There is a wide variety of intelligence in the animal kingdom - ranging from primates down to bivalves, which lack a distinct "brain" at all. In terms of intelligence, a lobster is closer to some insects, which we seem to have no problem killing en-masse with chemical agents if they enter our home or threaten our crops. I'm not sure it's totally knowable whether lobsters have the capacity to suffer, but moral consistency on this issue would require sacrifices far above just "not eating meat".
- causality0 5y agoBeing semi-frozen isn't torture. From reports of human beings who nearly died by it, freezing to death is a very pleasant, dreamy sensation.
- willhamina 5y agoMmmmm! Sounds tasty! Think I'll order fresh fried lobster at my favorite Chinese restaurant for lunch today!
- nsonha 5y agowhether we should protect animals should be based on the sustainability of such practice (can the human race sustain not eating/experimenting on octopuses and lobsters), not the fact that they feel pain. Of course they do. If this "discovery" is how they try to convince people to support the cause then they're out of touch with reality.
- Layke1123 5y agoThis just in, humans begin eating older humans because it's the only way to survive the climate calamity currently. With less boomers, wealth inequality had gone way down and no one is starting with record fights anymore!
- monster_group 5y agoI find this article jarring. FTA - "it's important to be cautious even if there's not complete certainty these animals are sentient." Uh what? I am no zoologist or marine biologist (or whatever 'ologist) but this is ridiculous. Octopii are known to be very intelligent. Lobsters may not be as intelligent as octopii but they are big and complex creatures. To assume that they are not sentient and will not feel pain if you throw them alive in boiling water is arrogant and pretentious. If you don't know for sure, the assumption should be the opposite unless proven otherwise.
- anothernewdude 5y agoTrees are big too.
- hh3k0 5y agoWhat a knee-jerk response to a perfectly fine comment…
- TaupeRanger 5y agoI would agree to err on the side of caution, but the fact of the matter is we really don't know how different the qualia of other animals are from that of humans.
- rwmj 5y agoOff topic, but the correct plural of octopus is octopodes (or octopuses). From the classical Greek word for foot (πούς, plural πόδες). Only Latin 2nd declension nouns turn -us into -i. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Noun https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Noun
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- exo-pla-net 5y agoAnd to be even more precise, "octopuses" is the standard modern usage. Octopodes is increasingly antiquated.
- slver 5y ago> MPs: Octopuses feel pain and need legal protection Right. Most animals feel pain... > When you think of an octopus or lobster, what comes to mind? Seafood or intelligent marine life? Many animals we eat in industrial quantities are intelligent life... Honestly, WTF is wrong with this article. The level of argument is as if they've just found out to their shock that meat doesn't grow on trees.
- justanotherguy0 5y agoYeah fuck this shit. I don't give a fuck if an octopus can perform differential calculus; I'm still going to eat it.
- rozab 5y agoYes, but as I understand it existing animal welfare legislation in the UK only applies to vertebrates.
- limbicsystem 5y agoNo. What is weird about this is that octopuses are already included in animal rights legislation and have the same protection as vertebrates. It's like these MPs haven't even bothered to check... Edit: I should have read TFA. It's actually about commercial fishing more than labs. I have some sympathy with the octopus bit. But I have a hard time getting too protective of lobsters.
- slver 5y agoI'm not sure why we consider more intelligent life as more worthy of protection. Why do we consider a specimen in isolation and not a species in its ecosystem. Eating one crab is considered better than one octopus. What about 100 crabs vs 1 octopus? Where do we draw the line? Or if we consider something not smart enough based on our arbitrary criteria, it's open season to eat as much as we can of it. We're mixing here categories that completely don't go together. Whether we hunt and eat an animal shouldn't be based on its intelligence. But rather on considerations of sustainability and ecosystem disruption. This entire article seems extremely far off from making a coherent argument whatsoever that our actions should be based on.
- kharak 5y agoThe most significant gain for animal rights will be the day, when we can produce inexpensive lab-grown meat (including fish) that is indistinguishable from livestock based products. We could also really use a framework for recognizing and categorizing consciousness in other lifeforms. And translate that into a law that automatically applies tiered protection to all other lifeforms. We probably need to figure out consciousness in ourselves first, though.
- jtdev 5y agoThe farms that grow the inputs to your lab goo will have permits to shoot wild animals on these properties… it’s called a “block permit” and farmers in my area are known to kill so many deer through these permits that bulldozers are needed to handle the disposal/burial of the masses of animals they kill… and why do they do this? Because feeding humans is actually a rather important task. Step off the concrete sometime… the solutions to the worlds problems and injustices are often far more complex and nuanced than what is proposed by the modern left.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sinsterizme 5y agoThe scale of these "block permit" killings and the amount of suffering this would cause is incomparable to industrial farming. This is not worth worrying about
- jtdev 5y agoOkay, how do you feel about monocultures of soybean doused in glyphosate and multi-annual applications of synthetic fertilizers (which create radioactive leachate as a manufacturing byproduct)?
- nobodyknowsyoda 5y agoObviously not great, therefore doing less of it holistically is useful. You do realize most of that soy goes to feeding livestock...
- trefgin 5y agoIs it still not self evident that pain is a key mechanism in almost all animals?
- dennis_jeeves 5y agoIt is to me, pain is a survival instinct to avoid injury, hence ensuring survival.
- roenxi 5y agoIt is good practice to be cynical about politics. Are they serious or are they trying to sneak something through under cover of a distraction?
- hprotagonist 5y agoillegal squid fishing in the pacific?
- optimalsolver 5y agoSponsored by Big Octopus?
- inops 5y agoI see no reason why this wouldn't be serious. To put these comments into context, it's in preparation of the government's Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill[1] coming before the Commons. The Bill would set up an Animal Sentience Committee to scrutinise policies' effects on sentient animals. The government have brought this forward in preparation of future changes to British animal welfare legislation, now Britain has legislative independence in this area, post-EU exit. The Queen's Speech in May announced Britain would pursue "the highest standards of animal welfare", and the government said it would make Britain a "global leader" in this area[2]. As the Bill currently stands, it limits the Committee in considering only vertebrate animals (and therefore it cannot report with regards to others, including octopuses and lobsters). These MPs want to amend it to cover these other animals. Whether or not the Sentience Committee's reports are properly considered in policy is another matter. [1] https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2867 https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2867 [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57072922 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57072922
- goodpoint 5y ago> It is good practice to be cynical about politics. This sentence itself is political and presents a cynical worldview. Anything can be use as a political tool. However, no psychologist would doubt than compassion is a fundamental trait of a healthy human mind.
- 5y ago
- jl2718 5y agoI think a society must first define their values before trying to align to them. Elimination of pain and suffering as a primary value, changes everything. A superintelligent overlord given that objective would simply eliminate all life on earth. If preservation of life was a value, it would sterilize everything and put all existing life in a coma. If the objective was happiness, it would drug us during the coma. But it would not be so dumb as to choose those things. I don’t know what it would choose exactly, but, I think it would have something to do with the purpose of life itself in this universe, which can be seen as a fundamental force to fight entropy at the mesoscale between electromagnetism and gravity.
- nsonha 5y agoYour logic has the comlexity of that from comic book characters. Brainiac or ultron? Cmon!
- jl2718 5y agoI have never read a comic book. Maybe I should start. Is there one you would suggest?
- dalbasal 5y ago"A society must" in what sense? Some, mostly modern, societies (eg constitutions) sometimes do "define their values" but rarely in the way that you mean. IE, they're defined in regular human terms like justice and stuff. No society that I know of "defines its values" in terms of uber abstract principles that everything else is derivative of. Some, mostly modernist, occasionally platonist philosophers try to do this... but thats a philosophical exercise. The way societies actually work is that we have values, because people have values. We rationalise, abstract, deconstruct, cross reference, expand, contract, torture, abandon, repurpose, revise and revisit those values in a never ending process. That is, in fact, what society is. What you are describing is asimov computer code.
- kukx 5y agoThe values are different in different cultures. Western civilization is based on Judeo-Christian values. It is the source.
- anon321321323 5y agoThis is really about money. Big business is ramping up artificial meat and big farming is also shifting to growing vegetarian food crops. Real meat will be only for the rich. Just the way they like it.
- uh_uh 5y agoGood. Market incentives are not always unethical. If anything, we should strive to build an economy where market incentives align with moral objectives. I welcome a world where artificial meat is practical.
- anon321321323 5y agoExcept that the artificial meat substitutes we have right now, eg those fake burgers, aren't exactly better. They are worse than the meat they replace. Its not ethical or moral its just the market moving. The vegetarian farming isn't more ethical either. Its usually mono-cropping at large scale. see also: corn.
- uh_uh 5y agoIf you want to improve a situation, at first you will make slow progress. But I'm willing to bet on artificial meat being an engineering problem and ultimately becoming better than the real thing.
- anon321321323 5y agoMy thing is the amount of processing involved. How much artificial junk is in there? Is it actually seen as food? These aren't trivial questions. The food industry has a habit of lacing processed food with so much junk its barely recognisable.
- EvilEy3 5y agoThis is as unethical as it can be. Animals are the last thing they think about, and I dread thinking what goes into creation of this artificial meat.
- saadalem 5y agothere’s was a debate about whether fish feel pain and the best moment is “actually plants might feel pain” [0] >> plants add caffeine to their nectar to enhance their pollinators memory and cognition >> plants synthesize almost all known neurotransmitters [0]: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Balu%C5%A1ka-Commentary-on-Key-on-Fish-Pain-1-Should-A-Balu%C5%A1ka/c746b1fe1f738b1d7ac5f5aff8b655dc986b6b76?p2df https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Balu%C5%A1ka-Commentar...
- nsonha 5y agoI guess feeling pains by that definition isn't really an useful test, being sentient is. We dont know what animals have sentience, but the prevailing theory is a central nevous system makes it possible.
- bodelecta 5y agoJust a personal comment. I used to love calamari, I'm from Scotland so seafood is plentiful and of a high standard. However I decided never to eat it again after watching "my octopus teacher" on Netflix. It's an emotive documentary clearly made to evoke feelings in the audience, it certainly changed my mind. We can't effectively measure animal intelligence compared to humans, we make decisions based on ethics and morality so I made that decision to never eat squid again. It's clear that humans over-consume and as an "intelligent species" who can make decisions based on morality and ethics, we still collectively seem unable to logically reason this overconsumption will eventually effect us all.
- EvilEy3 5y ago> It's clear that humans over-consume and as an "intelligent species" who can make decisions based on morality and ethics, we still collectively seem unable to logically reason this overconsumption will eventually effect us all. Why should individuals that live for themselves and don't share the same values as you do suffer because of your decisions?
- bodelecta 5y agoYou've summed it up in your sentence "live for themselves" i.e. greed and selfishness. And what do you mean by suffer? Do you mean the richest people earning less or people in poverty? We could live in a more ethical and sustainable way, we just choose not to
- EvilEy3 5y ago> You've summed it up in your sentence "live for themselves" i.e. greed and selfishness. There's a line between exploiting others and caring for yourself. I consider myself example of second. I couldn't care less about rest of people. > We could live in a more ethical and sustainable way, we just choose not to I could live without shower and toilet paper, I could live without washing machine or meat. Doesn't mean that I want to. If you want to live in more ethical and sustainable way — all the power to you. But don't force your moral onto me. E: morale -> moral
- mustafa_pasi 5y agoMy guess is this is the UK government trying to somehow mess with the seafood markets to benefit the UK seafood industry. Their quibbles with neighbouring countries over fishing territories is well known. Maybe they are trying to introduce some legislation that makes it much harder for neighbouring countries to sell fish to the UK.
- uh_uh 5y agoSometimes I like to think about how historians will talk about us in the distant future where artificial meat production is the norm. I think it is quite likely that the big story about us will be our treatment of other conscious animals rather than the culture war issues dominating people's minds now.
- jm__87 5y agoHumans are still doing some pretty awful things to each other, I'm not sure our treatment of animals is really near the top of the list. We can obviously do much better with regard to our treatment of animals, but the same can be said about a lot of things.
- uh_uh 5y agoI think we have too look at the numbers. There are 600 million pigs kept worldwide, most of them in miserable circumstances. The more this number grows (and it is on a growth trajectory) the more we should be concerned about this. (Though my personal opinion is that the current number is already unacceptable.)
- EvilEy3 5y agoThere are 700 million people below extreme poverty level(less than 1.90$ a day. Tell them how concerned you are about pigs.
- MperorM 5y agoWe should be concerned about both. That said, whether to spend your energy on global poverty or abolishing factory farming really comes down to how you highly you rank animal suffering. Is a thousand chickens tortured from birth to slaughter, worse than someone dying from malaria? What about ten thousand? It's not at all obvious to me how animal sentience compares to human sentience, but it's clear to me that we should at least give it some consideration. Even when I give animals only a fraction of the concern I have for humans, it's clear to me that factory farming is an incredible source of unnecessary suffering. I hope we can learn to be considerate of not only humans different from us but other species too.
- vanilla-almond 5y agoThe arguments for and against pain in crustaceans is covered quite well in this 2018 article from The Guardian that focuses on lobsters: Is it wrong to boil lobsters alive? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/11/is-it-wrong-to-boil-lobsters-alive https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/11/is-it-wrong-to... Some key points from The Guardian article: - Boiling alive lobsters is illegal in New Zealand and Switzerland - Robert Elwood, a professor at Queen's University Belfast, is a leading researcher in this field. He believes lobsters should be killed before boiling. - Accepted wisdom about crustacean behaviour to painful stimuli is that it is a reflex, not a reaction to pain. - No experiment can answer questions about pain in crustaceans definitively, but Elwood's research makes him see "as much evidence for pain in crustaceans as there is in many vertebrates". - The argument against crustacean pain is that their brain structure is so different to ours. We know where pain occurs in the human brain, but those equivalent brain regions do not exist in crustaceans. - Robert Steneck, professor of marine sciences at the University of Maine, has been studying lobsters since 1983: "I'm not convinced they feel pain...The problem has more to do with how we anthropomorphise various critters" - Maisie Tomlinson, a campaigner for a charity called Crustacean Compassion, says "It’s estimated that an edible crab that is boiled alive may take up to three minutes to lose consciousness. That’s something that would be unconscionable in a vertebrate animal, where they talk about milliseconds to lose consciousness [in a slaughterhouse]" - Is there a best way to kill a lobster? For a restaurant, professor Robert Elwood says "I would have [a device] that gave them electrical stunning, which completely destroys the central nervous system in a microsecond".
- Teknoman117 5y agoI was always told that the reason lobster is usually sold live is because bacteria in the lobster starts to multiply quickly after they die and the meat will become unsafe. Cooks have told me to either run a knife through their brain or throw them in a freezer for half an hour to shut them down. Incidentally, I used to do the latter as a kid when catching bugs outside to feed a green anole I caught and was taking care of for a Boy Scout merit badge...
- vanilla-almond 5y ago
- jillesvangurp 5y agoThe simple counter argument is that most life in nature does not end well or painlessly at all. Dying sucks. Especially when you are being mauled to death by some predator. The best you can hope for is that it will be quick. Violent death is a near certainty; unless some crippling decease gets you first. The reality of nature is that there are no nursing homes, only jaws of death. It's of course not an excuse to be needlessly cruel. But it is a valid reason to re-consider how nature works. Leaving animals alone does not mean they get to die in their sleep surrounded by their loving families and mourned by their loved ones like we all hope for. Worse, a lot of the animals we kill in order to eat them exist solely because we eat them. Ceasing to eat them adds up to genocide. We have entire sub species of all sorts of animals that would not exist or continue to exist if it weren't for the fact that we breed them in order to eat them. Cows, pigs, and chickens are good examples of animals that have no place in nature and would likely die out quickly because of the very same properties that caused us to breed them in that direction. Many billions of animals would not exist if it weren't for the fact that we plan to eat them. Equating veganism to genocide is clearly a bit of a stretch. But just ask yourself if it is better for the animal and its species to not have existed at all or is eating meat under some circumstances perhaps not that unethical? It's what the rest of nature does after all.
- mcculley 5y agoThis conflates at least three different issues. To me, it is irrelevant how intelligent a creature is or whether it can react to pain. The fundamental issue is whether or not it experiences suffering. We are very close to having synthetic intelligences. That doesn’t mean we should care about shutting them off or damaging them, as long as they cannot suffer.
- watercooler_guy 5y agoI think people are generally aware that the fundamental issue is experience of suffering, as you say. It's just that since that can't be measured directly, people talk about intelligence and pain reaction since that's what is studied and observed in order to infer about experience of suffering. But for synthetic intelligences, I think we need to be extra careful because the suffering can be there without any means to notify humans, if those means were never programmed in. If an AI has self awareness and self preservation goals comparable to humans, but no comparable e.g. English language subroutines, being shut off at random times would probably cause it to suffer psychological distress in silence. This is all to say that for the sake of both AI and animals, we need to learn how to directly detect brain activity corresponding to pain, in different types of brains.
- mrtweetyhack 5y agoEverything feels pain
- noxer 5y agoThe title is very nonsensical it almost seem to suggestion that "feeling pain" is the reason to protect some living things over others.